Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Our postindustrial information age is acutely aware of the role of method in the critical questioning of assertions of knowledge. “How do we, and how can we know this or that?” “What are the criteria, credentials, and standards that serve as foundations for truthful claims to know something?” While at first blush such questions may seem overly philosophical, our failure to adequately address them can and often does have injurious effects on learners.

Students frequently enter school with a hidden implicate identity, that is to say, a sense of selfhood existing before and beyond educational categorical identification. Their unique identity is largely shaped by unconventional ways of knowing and sense-making of the world. Students, whose core being stems from anomalous epistemologies, are often ridiculed as non-academic, shamed as ‘slow’ learners, or marginalized in tracks for learning-disabilities or transgressive students. Education betrays them. Their multi-perspectival consciousness, fashioned from unconscious, instinctual, intuitive, or tacit everyday awareness, is not valued within the narrow cognitive portfolio of acceptable learning, labeled instead as a kind of katabasis, to be understood here as a fall from academic grace. Consequently, noetic learners are often held back from grade-level progression not because they are not smart, but because their school suffers from a naive reductionism regarding the notion of intelligence.

Education today lacks of a pluralistic view of knowing and knowledge, and is therefore unable to recognize the value of alternative knowing within a vision of excellence and human wholeness. Neurodiverse learners, who if they lived in other cultural and learning contexts would be considered ‘gifted,’ suffer concussive outcomes in our schools from which many never recover. This is but one aspect of the current ‘sickness-unto-learning’ that plagues American education.

My noetic education project is a call to educators to do all they can to instigate shifts away from the status incumbency of scientific positivism and objectivity toward more integral ways of conceptualizing learning, knowledge, intelligence, and a more fully formed human being, as part of its generative mission. We must do what we can to end educational trauma caused by the imposed identity of educational structures upon learners by assuring that alternative knowing and knowledge are provided a respectful seat in the house of learning.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

The notion of a single, determinable objective reality that serves as a foundational idea of scientific materialism has been called into question by scholars, particularly in the disciplines of phenomenology, psychology, and humanities. Galileo proclaimed that only those properties of things accountable to mathematical measurement are objectively real and, consequently, all subjective qualities are misapprehensions. Later, Descartes established the hard and fast division between the thinking mind as subject and the material world as object. Both views forsake the viability of the spontaneous nature of our pre-conceptual and pre-objective world of experience.

Knowledge that splits humanity from nature, spirit from earth, and mind from body must be viewed within the current Anthropocene shadow with great suspicion. For millennia, shamans of indigenous cultures trafficked in wondrous realms, mapping realities between human and more-than-human worlds. Shamans today continue to serve as apprentices to and mediators between tribal members and animal and terrestrial intelligences through their visions, trances, ecstasies, dreams, and psychic journeys, thereby acquiring sensory and embodied knowledge. Shamans’ personal callings on behalf of their communities are marked by a personal illness and they can only realize their calling by first healing themselves.

Unfortunately, civilized humanity has forsaken its heritage of noetic understanding of extra-human realities. Indigenous hunters, healers, and shamans achieved pre-numerical knowledge through altering their everyday consciousness by dance, drumming, chanting, stories, sweat lodges, and wilderness quests. We stand severed from a vital source of our legacy by strict reliance on homogenized standards of thought. Few of us today have a reciprocal, noetic relationship with non-human, terrestrial forms of intelligence. Michael Feyerabend asks, “Is teaching the latest scientific fashion as the truth really the best way of preparing the next generation for life?” The current fashion of STEM dominated curricular narrow learners’ cognitive/perceptual bandwidth; arts and humanities curricula would broaden it.

As a result of my study for more than 30 years of nonconventional learning in folklore, liberal arts, performing arts, and fine arts programs at elementary schools, high schools, conservatories, and universities, I have come to value a spectrum of cognitive/perceptual modalities presented by folk and professionally trained artists. Mynoetic literacy project, expressed in several scholarly articles, online posts, and public presentations (also in a book currently in progress), refutes the notion of intelligence as a single generative cognitive function in favor of a pluralistic model of learning with an embodied, all-sided mind (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/existential-intimacy-learning-seeking-wholeness-stem-rojcewicz-phd/).

When we attempt today to grasp the world exclusively through calculative reason, we estrange ourselves from intimate participation with the sensuous life-world of direct experience.  We ignore our animated connection with natural landscapes that engage and extend our senses. Our human mind-body-spirit instrument of knowing underperforms, lacking attunement to the world and ourselves. As a counter, noetic literacy argues for the legitimacy of mytho-poetic, intersensory learning modalities, such as used by indigenous healers, artists, and religious intuitives. Noetic knowledge is not ontic knowledge – that is, it’s not made up of easily separable elements – and therefore cannot be fully disclosed by logical exposition. It is a wholeness of the incorporeal intellect that embraces the irrational, spiritual, ethical, and aesthetic substance of life.

The academy’s specialized curriculum focused more on earning than on broad learning lacks a sufficient probing of the interactive field between the number-based sciences and the sensory-based knowledge of everyday experience. Noetic literacies offer us distinct epistemic antidotes to the philosophy of mechanism that, in the words of the poet Samuel Coleridge, “strikes death” upon an all-sided consciousness. By our re-legitimizing and supporting noetic literacies at all levels of school curricula, learners can directly encounter Anima Mundi, i.e., soul in and of the world, thereby shattering illusions of nature as disconnected from humanity and the world lacking sagacious psychic life (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/imaginalia-folk-wisdom-eclipse-literal-peter-m-rojcewicz-phd/.

The natural and technology-assisted sciences are particular, useful ways of engendering information and engaging the world, but there are other equally viable ways that lead to aesthetic, emotional, spiritual, and ethical satisfaction. While not abandoning the Enlightenment project’s to grasp the world in rational terms, noetic education contributes to knowledge-generation based on other than strictly scientific principles without dismissing science and its essential achievements.

We live in a critical place at an auspicious time requiring our appropriate and just measure of response to the chaos caused by indeterminate, discontinuous change. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermrojcewicz/recent-activity/all). We must decide whether to continue to support a numbers-based model of partial growth over human wholeness. We must critically engage the socio-political forces that polarize what should be a healthy bond between inter-sensory, intuitive awareness and number-based knowledge. Unfortunately, the academy’s fundamental commitment to rational cognicentrism makes human fragmentation acceptable, human impairment permissible, and educational trauma inevitable. Preventing further wounding of the integral nature of learners caused by the present educational system is our dire responsibility. Failing in that, education presents, causes, and perpetuates its own pathology.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

STEM Education:

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses permeate the academy, valuing technical training over broad based learning. While its scientific and technological literacy provides some skills essential to employment, STEM’s tech savvy and quantitative focus undervalues imagination, separates perception from cognition, narrows intuitive awareness, and validates nature’s domination. Its grand narratives encourage universal generalizations and unrealistic taxonomies.

STEM enshrines logic and calculation; it idolizes objectivity. Privileging exteriority over interiority, it projects a flatland view of reality. Its dominant modes of knowing are scientific materialism and positivism. What begins in our elementary and middles schools on a personal level as an instrumentation of reason that narrows and routinizes thinking, ends up on the socio-cultural level as a mechanization of life, shackling cognitive freedom.

As such, we witness today an imbalance in the academy injurious to one’s integral humanity. We stand at a decisive crossroad and must decide whether we shall continue to support narrow, piece-meal growth over human wholeness. The analytical STEM disciplines of higher education with their codified procedures do not address full human development. STEM knowledge by itself leads to a narrow view of knowledge and life as wholly rational, controllable, and objective.

Higher education needs a pluralistic conception of what constellates intelligent thought and behavior that joins analytical reason with hands-on engagement with art making to derive more accurate models of mind and reality. To that end, I offer Noetic Education as a constructive postmodern critique of higher education’s hyper-rational emphasis as displayed in STEM-heavy curricula.

Noetic Education:

The purpose of Noetic education is to enhance the capacities of the mind-body, transforming the self through a release of the reconstructive imagination that allows us deep entry into an alien state of mind. A noetic approach originated in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl’s so-called transcendental turn, as developed in his lecture courses “Introduction toLogic and Theory of Knowledge” (1906/07) and “Logic and General Theory of Science”(1917/18).  “Noetic” comes from the Greek word nous, meaning all encompassing ways of knowing, discursive and non-discursive (James). Noetic education values learning through a wide repertoire of modalities, including the imaginal, aesthetic, and transcendent. Its vision of the interdependence of mind/body/spirit and humanity with the earth emphasizes holistic, cooperative, and relational learning.

If we are to foster human wholeness and not fail people in the healthy formation of their lives, definitions of being smart must move beyond a strict definition of reason as but a tool of quantitative efficiency.  We must understand learning not only in terms of what can be assessed by tests of strict quantification.

Noetic Education through the arts and sciences makes available to the mind-body more than logic, not less, integrating bodily perceptions with rational thought. Noetic education pursues the intimate engagement of myth, symbol, art, and religious systems of knowledge with the calculation and logic of modern empirical science. Mytho-poetic thinking in images allows one to see all experiences as fundamentally literal and metaphoric, subject to interpretation and change.

Metaphor drives beyond the literal, liberating us from repressive cognitive styles. Mythic thinking is direct critical thinking in images and metaphors that provide perspectives toward life, capable of transforming mere events into meaningful experience of soul.  Literate “readers” of images are empowered to enter the designs and expressions of the peak achievements of knowledge along the human adventure. Without this rational and aesthetic capacity to grasp images, we are orphaned from the rich conversation of humanity begun in primeval times. This union of objective and subjective knowledge is best achieved through the arts and sciences that include art making and aesthetic literacy.

Noetic Literacy through the Arts:

Creative and innovative people in all fields demonstrate a broad-based literacy beyond written language and numbers, joining discursive and non-discursive knowing, as well as abstract and embodied learning. There is something inherent in the images of each art’s “language” that prepare the mind for sophisticated cognitive activities, conceptual and perceptual.  Image making is the mind’s fundamental means of knowing; no cognitive operation is more central to consciousness. New learning results when lived experiences provide, confirm or modify images of oneself and the world. Not simply metaphors for ideas, images relate to how people acquire, organize, retrieve, and use information.

Accomplished scientists, like artists everywhere, note the importance of imagery in their most significant work. Jerome Friedman knew scientific “Reasoning is constructed with movable images, just as poetry is.” By imagining he could travel with a beam of light at 186,000 miles per second, Albert Einstein acknowledged the key role kinesthetic and visual images played in his Gedanken thought experiment. A vision of molecules forming the archetypal image of the uroboros snake led to Frederick von Kekule’s discovery of the six–carbon benzene ring. Creativity and innovation always result from the generative union of imagination and reason.

Whether we look to art or science, it is clear that broad based knowledge rests upon interrelationships between distinct clusters of multi-sensory images in the mind. The best artists and scientists integrate intuition and unconscious processes with mental skills, including accurate observation, spatial and kinesthetic thought, identification of key parts of a complex whole, and recognition or invention of patterns governing systems (Root-Bernstein). When STEM-based elements fuse with the arts and humanities through complex, creative work, people achieve an existential intimacy of learning with their all-sided humanity.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs

Pacifica Graduate Institute

“

All true things change and only those things that change remain true.”   C.G. Jung

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

People are carefully thinking about educational opportunities during this time of radical uncertainty.  They hope to strategically find their way through a world of increasing complexity and rapid, unpredictable change.  Grasping the nature, order, and the way of the world has long been a goal long sought throughout higher education. Today, however, this question is highly problematized and traditional certitudes of the Academy are hotly contested. 

As the present scale and pace of global change is enormous, universities currently experience social pressure to justify their relevance, not only regarding the liberal arts and humanities, but also the ostensible importance of entering higher education during a time of record unemployment.  How should higher education institutions respond to a world of the COVID-19 pandemic, systemic racism, Neo-liberalism, an increasing global mental health crisis, economic volatility, and planetary deterioration and therefore make matriculation a sagacious decision?  This post is simultaneously my meditation on existing conditions at Pacifica and an imagining of where I hope it soon will be.

At Pacifica, graduate education prepares people to grasp the warp and woof of our unique times: paradox, chaos, liminality, asymmetry, emergence, and synchronicity.  To that end, we are fashioning our curriculum and pedagogy to support people to navigate global turbulence by featuring adaptive psychological skills that include frustration tolerance, cognitive flexibility, resilience, response-ableness, and discernment of the difference between personal agency as a doer and one being done to.  

Pacifica is a living entity, animated by multiple images of our common purpose. Rather than having curricula focused reductively on discrete academic disciplines, a curriculum model more suited to worlds of memory, we favor holism and systems thinking, while emphasizing transdisciplinarity, interdependence, relations, fields, and context. Our knowing is transformative and not mere data acquisition, when we experience the self as semipermeable and nonlocal, heightening our intersubjectivity. We seek new conceptual frameworks to challenge our fundamental ideas as to how knowledge is created, transmitted, and maintained by whom and why.

Institutions in every sector of society are undergoing internal self-examinations and assessments of mission, vision, and values; Pacifica is no exception. Alarmed by denials of potent realities, including the potentially deadly pandemic, institutional racism, and climate change, we are asking meta-questions about how Pacifica itself learns and engenders learning, the basis for our knowing, and whose values and group interests are codified within and privileged by celebrated bodies of knowledge in our curricula.  

We resolutely commit ourselves to critically interrogating our organizational biases and assumptions that are necessary to engender organizational transformation.  This commitment is of two fundamental kinds: a comprehensive commitment to Pacifica’s health as a living, whole system, and not to the self-interest of any one group, since no one works, let alone thrives, in isolation; and a commitment to uncompromising thoughtfulness in all things, understood not as irrefutable fact, but a refusal to live hypocritically, forging a community of incontestable honesty, wherein everyone can be themselves, safely and without intimidation. 

Pacifica is positioning itself to make pedagogical, technological, and methodological adjustments that enhance Zoom teleconferencing practices and optimize our digital learning management system (D2L) for easier navigation, dialogic activities, and library research support.  Recent student and faculty surveys have targeted key areas of remote delivery that call for immediate improvement.  While it is certain much more needs to be done, Pacifica is moving its degree programs beyond passive modes of knowledge transmission to active forms of knowledge creation. 

Since the shelter-in-place mandate, the Institute is designing virtual communities of inquiry, wherein synchronous and asynchronous remote learning activities can lead to cognitive engagements between students and course content, social exchanges among students, and pedagogical interactions between students and faculty.  We are recommending to faculty a constructivist model of learning that stimulates collaborative knowledge, as well as individual and collective forms of intelligence.  The online culture we envision is a critical community of learners who together in cohorts socially construct new knowledge.

So why Pacifica now? To help people navigate a turbulent world, each of our degree programs have roots in the fecund soil of depth psychology, since self-knowledge is a prerequisite for knowledge of the world. Our programs study the unconscious mind that is itself characterized by uncertainty, non-rationality, compensation, shadow, and self-organization expressed in dreams, myths, and synchronistic fusions of archetypal processes with physical events, emerging from the foundational ground common to psyche and nature that renders categories of opposites obsolete, and where the inner and outer worlds are one.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

This post is not primarily about the COVID-19 virus, so much as it is an occasion to address an emerging PGI response to one another and the school in the time of global illness. From a depth psychological level of meaning, coronavirus may be imagined as the objective psyche’s compensatory response to nationalism, tribalism, neoliberalism, identity politics, xenophobia, and all that isolates individuals from themselves, others, and the earth. 

The coronavirus pandemic eschews all conventional categories, carrying its invisible threat to all. The virus privileges no human hierarchy, rank, status, or power. Blue-collar workers, corporate executives, the homeless, professional athletes, film stars, heads of state, the young, and the old are equally at risk. Consequently, we now witness people around the world reaching across boundaries to assist and support one another. 

Even as we “shelter-in-place” and practice “social distancing,” we move paradoxically beyond radical autonomy of the “me-space” and professional specialization toward a “we-space” of civic relationship and job-related collaborations. Surgeons are now surprisingly aligned with seamstresses and those with 3-D printers in the construction of needed medical masks. 

Closer to home and within the organizational borders of Pacifica, we witness people manifesting powerful displays of what some of us refer to as Institutional Citizenship, grounded in our mission-related way of work, study, and relating to one another. Our Pacifica citizenship, grounded upon an ethic of care and extending outward by our bonds of affection, is geared to the professional growth and vitality of faculty, staff, and students, as well as sustainable well-being of the school.

Citizenship, defined as a community’s fully engaged individuals, means more than being simply an employee or student. The Institute can move forward our audacious and integral mission by supporting service-related activities that extend our learning beyond traditional job-description-borders of an office, academic unit, or student cohort and have a material impact on the quality and health of the work environment. Learning with, from, and on behalf of one another as fully engaged citizens is necessarily a collective act. It requires that we consider how we are to show up on campus and who we need to be for one self and others. Some recent example responses are worth noting here.

Pacifica’s “Circle of Chairs” and “Senate Leadership Council” submitted a proposal to the IMC and Board of Trustees, indicating a way to assist our housekeepers, receptionists, and ground crew, vulnerable to financial risk caused by the pandemic. In addition, Counseling Psychology created a webinar, focusing on maintenance of a relational and depth psychological frame for psychotherapists, as they move to the electronic realm of “telehealth.” Lastly, the Offices of Academic Affairs and Student Services offered support to the campus by running “PowerCampus” reports, providing PC information, orienting those unfamiliar with “Teams,” and advising on the handling of files on personal computers or flash drives, so as to avoid violations of FERPA compliance. The webinar was shared with students, practicum sites, sister schools, consortia, and local professional groups.

Such examples of our engaged-citizenship emphasize work actions, values, and service that generate, maintain, and improve the infrastructure, values, morale, and safety of the campus: commitment, care, selflessness, respect, mutuality, availability, and willingness to inform oneself of institutional operations. To prize citizenship at Pacifica means we acknowledge the mutual obligation to enhance our personal agency and growth and act in ways that increase the effectiveness of others, while furthering PGI’s future. This is our emerging covenant of faith and solidarity in the possibilities of one another. This trust is based on a healing fantasy of reciprocity and creative synergy that comes from leveraging upward our resources and potentials. 

A school of engaged citizens must be more than a collective ego or wego; it must recognize everyone’s contributions as forms of intelligence, creative presence, and ways of knowing. Knowledge by presence means not only that we consider the outer data of the world of our decision-making but also that we stand available to ourselves and others, embracing non-defensive openness, flexibility of thought, curiosity, suspension of disbelief, willingness to be changed by self-inquiry, and courage to stand up to toxic rumor and falsehood.

Our availability and presence requires self-monitoring and self-governance. This means we command our impulses toward an optimal self and openness to a greater good. To enhance our self-agency and optimize the capacities of others requires emotional intelligence that minimally includes an ability to modify our personal agendas on behalf of others. 

More work needs to be done, however, to strengthen our new compact with the PGI community beyond whenever the present threat may end. We must continue to speak the language and enact the values of fully engaged-citizenship, so that it doesn’t degenerate into a code of obeisance or servitude. The three-legged stool of reciprocity and care upon which it stands must extend to all, even those who are out-of-step, eccentric, or contrarians.

Linguistic anthropology indicates that language, among cultures everywhere, initiates and holds its members within its unique discourse. A community’s way of speaking is the unofficial but lived record of community values and acts. It presents an ideal image of how a culture sees itself and wants to be seen, as well as a shadow portrait of whom people are not, how they definitely do not live, and what topics, attitudes, practices, or perspectives are prohibited. For our campus to be healthy, our common discourse of engaged-citizenship and its embodiment must make room for diverse, dissenting views.

Because dissent is kin to diversity, a diverse community is never conflict free; rather, it is a place where conflicting ideas offer us learning opportunities. We can let go of doubts that lead to resistance and fear only by naming and expressing them. From this perspective, dissent itself can be a form of unspoken caring, a constructive first step toward finding a cultural role that would enhance self-development and the empowerment of others, while simultaneously moving the institution forward. 

Following that view, voicing dissent should not by itself cost one their community citizenship, as it may carry valuable alternatives to how we presently see and structure things. Dissent is constructive when it is a free act toward a desirable future, not a mere blaming, or fruitless complaint. A learning Institute, conducive to free inquiry, requires an open community, guided by an ethic of caring with a foundation in human relationships. 

In this time of Pacifica’s transition to online delivery and suspension of campus residencies due to the pandemic, I have witnessed faculty selflessly modifying personal agendas, offering their gifts of experience and knowledge for the development and vitality of their peers. As they now design new structures for their academic units, faculty embodies leadership through peer mentoring, counseling one another concerning work productivity and personal well-being. I see them respond with care to others’ needs, visible and unseen.

Let us boldly take heart from numerous acts of engaged-citizenship witnessed across the Pacifica community in the midst of the present global challenge. Let us together find inspiration to see our institutional and planetary community imaginatively as poets, visioning the cool surface and fiery depths of those in need. Let us continue our timely conversation about effective, relational ways of showing up for one another that link us to a intimate sense of relatedness and belonging to whatever is larger than ourselves, vitalizing into action our mysterious, generative nature. 

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Some look down upon academic learning, as elitist or out of touch. They heavily prize worldly acquisitions, victories, or various ways of “going for the gold.” Learning is, on the other hand, an act of total personality and whole being. Truly educated people blend form and substance, right views, and right practice. They “stand on two feet.” They stand on a foundation of disciplined knowledge of the external world, yes, but their intellectual accomplishments that reflect that knowledge are balanced by emotional maturity and self-knowledge, the pre-requisite for all other forms of knowledge.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Moody’s Investor Services recently asserted that the rate of colleges and universities that will go out of business is likely to triple annually in the years ahead. Small, private independent institutions  of 1500 students or less will find it increasingly challenging to meet enrollment goals.  What are educational institutions doing to address this projected future?

To build toward sustainability, schools continue to increase online programs. Mergers will occur,  as will acquisitions and purchases of non-profit schools by proprietary institutions and groups. Online offerings will continue to proliferate. Nontraditional adult learners will be a premier target audience for enrollment and admission. International student recruitment methods and practices will change, due to travel bans, visa problems, and a general xenophobia sensed by students from abroad. It is expected that international student enrollment will decline this year, as it did in fall 2017. Higher education leaders are understandably  concerned with the present and future viability of their organizations.

In the face of the present challenges, traditional economic models in higher education are changing. Universities must balance costs, quality, and sustainability, on the one hand, with innovation and compelling learning experiences, on the other.  Colleges and universities are increasing considering and engaging in consolidations, partnerships, and mergers to decrease costs, enhance institutional strengths, and acquire infrastructure required to effectively deliver programs and support services.

By consolidating underperforming or noncompetitive offices or programs, some colleges and universities seek to add to their mutual capacity for producing educational effectiveness. Those schools may find that by consolidating, say, their individual offices of the registrar or financial aid,  into a single office that serves both institutions, they attain greater efficiency of function at a reduction of cost.

Entering into partnerships with third-party educational vendors is not uncommon today and is likely to increase. A few customized models are worth mentioning. Vendors, Wiley Education Services among others, offer, as part of their partnership selections, customized models: fee for services, co-investment, and tuition revenue share, to name a few.

The fee for service model provides services and solutions for targeted support of specific projects. Targeting needs to be addressed may include enrollment management or program development. This model is best suited for educational institutions that possess developed infrastructure, capital, and resources.

The co-investment or “risk sharing” model has both the third-party vendor and the university making joint investments in an educational project’s start-up costs and ongoing expenses. The university can pay either a flat amount annually or a portion of the projected expenses. This models best serves a school that has some infrastructure, capital, and resources to effectively maintain projects.

The tuition share partnership option has schools providing a share of its tuition generated revenue to the vendor. This partnership model option requires a limited up-front investment by a school and therefore carries lower risk. The vendor provides a suite of student life cycle support of a wide range of university services. This model works well for schools with limited infrastructure, capital, and resources.

While the consolidations of offices or academic programs or the entering into customized partnerships with educational third parties allow universities to maintain their distinct identity defined through their mission, vision, and values, mergers are a more radical option that may or may not result with their school’s brand identity and tradition intact. In the face of inevitable closure or acquisition by another institution, schools may intentionally choose to merge. Mergers can be beneficial to both organizations or not. Leadership and bargaining strength play significant roles in such outcomes.

IN 2017, the financially struggling 130-year old Wheelock College and its neighbor Boston University announced they had merged. In that case, the merger proved mutually positive, as the smaller Wheelock maintained its name, tradition, and niche in the field of educational psychology. A portion of Wheelock’s staff and faculty moved over to be employed by Boston University. As a result of the merger, it is now the Wheelock School of Education and Human Development-Boston University. A much different scenario took place at Mount Ida College, where a merger resulted in the loss of the college’s name and educational identity. Its 84 acre campus was divided up among different members of the Massachusetts State University System. Unlike the situation at Wheelock, alumni of Mount Ida have no current school to which to identify and support.

In the face continuing costs, dwindling enrollments, increased competition, failing public confidence, and a capricious economy, higher education leadership is well advised to consider multiple option scenarios that should include consolidations, partnerships, and mergers. Even so, small schools without a substantial endowment or ongoing financial subsidy will continue to close.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Chief Academic Officer & Accreditation Liaison Officer

University of the West

We daily observe across the University of the West campus an inescapable mutuality of our roles and functions. Our most creative work is frequently accomplished in collaboration with others at the borders of our different units. How might the university effectively build bridges to new and current initiatives, leveraging this mutuality to enhance a synergy of positive, sustainable growth?

To ensure quality programming, a healthy workplace environment, financial viability, and recognizable educational brand, UWest must address all decisions at all levels of operation from a whole-systems perspective, rather than from an exclusive focus on isolated parts. A systems orientation to organizational development eschews acting ultimately as if programs are “stand-alones,” isolated from the whole by one-off procedures or implementation strategies. We should be weary of office-based or program-related “languages” and mini-cultures that foster intellectual silos, undermining team-orientated work.

A whole systems approach reinforces our intuitive insight that no discrete function can be understood isolated from the complex whole of which it is an integral part. “Silo-ed thinking” is atomistic, reducing things to its smallest component and favoring reductionism. As such, one may miss the forest for the trees. Systems thinking is, by contrast, contextual thinking that uses the logic of “both/and” and honors the long-range view, while favoring collaboration. Working in silos favors “nothing but” thinking, as in, “I am responsible for nothing but what’s in my job description and program.” Whole systems thinkers understand that, without discernment of the complete context, organizational meaning is truncated and partial. As a result, our knowledge of any single part is misleading, compromising the whole. This is as true for an organization that is a university as it is for a proprietary corporate business.

UWest’s holistic educational commitment by definition requires a systems orientation toward daily operations that addresses two important elements: structure and process. Our planning and implementation must have sufficient structure, so that we are not reinventing processes when a new opportunity emerges, thus dissipating resources, human and financial. At the same time, our systems must be flexible enough to enable us to respond nimbly and creatively to student and faculty needs, as well as to the interests of our community partners and university trustees. How might we achieve organizational deftness to make smart decisions quickly?

When too many players are involved, it’s often difficult to quickly pivot in new directions or implement new measures. A strategy to overcome these issues is to convene “skunkworks” projects. These are experimental teams of faculty and staff serving to provide the campus an entrepreneurial function and granted a freedom from conventional university procedures that can constrain customizing ideas and seizing opportunities on and off campus. Skunkworks operations can inspire and define feasible initiatives for investment. The initial campus learning community initiative referred to as “Self & Society” sprung from exactly this source. A small group of faculty and staff gathered under the auspices of the Office of Academic Affairs, armed with a “let’s make-it-happen” philosophy.

That learning community of first-time college students stood firmly upon the existing general education structures and processes of student support, featuring academic advisors, course coaches, community service learning, dialog and meditation groups, interdisciplinary courses, diversity activities, field projects, invited guest speakers, and a developmental math sequence highlighting quantitative reasoning. The learning community linked academic and student affairs with the offices of the registrar, wellness, student success, enrollment, marketing, and financial aid. The President and his Executive Team monitored developments and provided support.

Our learning community is now expanding into an innovative Undergraduate Curriculum Transformation initiative, launched by President Stephen Morgan, supported by the Trustees, and currently in the design phase. The first two courses of “Life and Culture” are scheduled for a fall 2018 launch. An interdisciplinary faculty team of boundary-crossers, who are insightful collaborators and designers of articulated pathways from classrooms to the campus to the community-at-large, has been for several months diligently at work. They are building toward a campus-wide cooperative accountability for the new undergraduate experience.

At the heart of our new undergraduate curriculum lies the big vision of a coherent and unified program of interdisciplinary learning, linked by a block schedule, common inquiry, socially relevant themes that will alternate over time, high impact learning activities, student-centered pedagogy, community service, and significant faculty/staff collaboration. This is meant as an antidote to the piecemeal-style curriculum extant throughout higher education that lacks clear vision and purpose.

Within the transformed undergraduate curriculum, UWest students and parents will easily perceive a learning arc, moving from the development of individuals capable of independent thought and self-agency to compassionate citizens capable of self-less service for the common good. We believe they will appreciate the focus on the interior and exterior life of individuals and groups. In core courses in the first two years and offerings in degree majors in their final two years, students will inquire into what it means to be and live as a human being in community. Critical thinking, self-reflection, intellectual agility, and pursuit of truth through inquiry, research, group projects, campus employment, and career advisement will develop skills that cross-train the heart and brain, suitable for personal satisfaction and global citizenship. Mutuality will be our watchword and our ethic.

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

Chief Academic Officer

University of the West

Rosemead, CA

Peter M. Rojcewicz, PhD

With the appearance in 1973 of Small is Beautiful, British economist E.F. Schumacher considered what might constitute sensible scale approaches to empowering people through economics. He launched an attack on the conventional notion that “bigger is always better” and that unlimited “growth is good.” Citing what he termed “Buddhist economics” based on the notion of “right livelihood,” Schumacher argued that for Buddhists the purpose of civilization is not the multiplication of wants and desires, but rectification of self through ethical formation of character. He coined the term “enoughness” in his consideration of human needs and limitations. University of the West (UWest), committed to whole-person education within the context of Buddhist wisdom and values, has held for 25 years this value of scale on behalf of human liberation through learning.

Located in east LA County, UWest is small by almost any standard of measurement of higher education. Presently enrolling 356 students, there is a 60% – 40% graduate to undergraduate ratio. Half of the total enrollment is international, mostly from Taiwan and China, but also with students from Sri Lanka, Thailand, Korea, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. While undergraduates hail from many states, the majority is from Southern California. Students share multiple perspectives and values in ongoing inquiry as to what it means to be human in a global society. However small in numbers, UWest is large in vision, seeking appreciation of East and West worldviews. A comprehensive university, UWest offers a BA degree, MA degrees, various MBAs, doctoral degrees, and certificates in liberal arts, psychology, religious studies, chaplaincy, and business. Tuition is relatively small, as UWest is rated in the top ten of the nation’s most affordable independent colleges and universities.

Small at UWest also means a dynamic support network of Academic and Student Affairs, Residence Life, Advising, Peer Mentoring, Financial Aid, Health and Wellness, Career Placement, and a Success Center. Students receive personal attention, featuring a 10 to 1 student-faculty ratio. They forge bonds with peers and staff. Advising is not an act faculty consider peripheral to teaching but integral to it, extending instruction to wherever students gather. Students are given space to be curious and explore rather than withdraw. A Student Early Alert System illuminates academic distress, providing strategic interventions for success. Students receive mindfulness and contemplative practice training within a whole-person orientation to growth and learning. They come to understand spirituality as an expanded identity and awareness of self interconnected with life. As outcomes of work-study, internships, and service learning, the sacred is valued as the practice of awareness and mutuality displayed in humanistic respect toward all. Dialog groups of faculty and students stimulate the mind to inquire.

Cross-campus communication is significantly enhanced by small. Town-hall meetings, open spaces, retreats, and student meetings with the President unify the campus. UWest uses a conversation-based model of learning both within and outside classrooms, so students can speak and be heard, see and be seen by others. They are provided platforms to develop leadership skills, emotional intelligence, deep listening, decision-making, and critical assessment as found, for example, in the MBA Financial Security Trade and Analysis course, wherein students handle a financial portfolio and invest responsibly in real time on Wall Street. Dialog is an effective mode of campus interaction, understood as “meaning flowing through community.” It rests on the notion that little can be understood in isolation. Through dialog, UWest students become people acting in relationship with others. Small at UWest increases relatedness, belonging, and community as a container of support, inspiration, reflection, and purpose.

UWest students see small as an opportunity to step into largeness. Students at large universities often feel overwhelmed and disengaged from campus life, and thus are implicitly encouraged to live small. At UWest, on the other hand, a learning community for first-time college students encourages the two-year cohort to live larger. Four special courses designed with their needs in mind are linked by theme, inquiry, and pedagogy, supported by learning pods, math and writing labs, interest circles, and peer and staff mentors. The learning community supports first-generation students to be who they are and who they can be. By stepping into a larger life, students expand their talents, skills, and knowledge beyond neediness and self-doubt.